“Bigger than the Black Death! Faster than the 14th Century! Cheaper than the Crusades!“ Tonight’s entry comes to us from ol’ Blighty and a couple of Monty Python albums. Back in 1977, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin broke away from the Python pack to make a little-remembered monster movie which has surprisingly little monster in it. Gilliam makes a brief cameo as an insane diamond (read: some rocks he thinks are diamonds because he’s mental) miner, and Neil Innes appears briefly as a herald. No other Pythons are present, despite a picture on the back of the box featuring the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The somewhat over-complicated story takes place in the kingdom of King Bruno the Questionable. Said kingdom is besieged by a terrible monster which strips the flesh from a man’s body in seconds. Also living in this kingdom is a young cooper’s apprentice named Dennis, who fancies Griselda Fishfinger, the fishmonger’s rotund beast of a daughter (hey, it’s the middle ages, you take what you can get, at least she has all her teeth). Dennis’s father dies, and Dennis heads to the city to make something of himself so Griselda will agree to marry him.

The city is surrounded by refugees trying to get inside the walls to escape the ravages of the monster. Only useful members of society and/or rich people are allowed inside the walls, so as you might guess, a mildly retarded barrel-maker who doesn’t actually know how to make barrels isn’t on the top of the welcome list. There is also a huge tournament going on, which King Bruno and his chamberlain Passelewe have put on to find a champion to slay the monster. The winner of the tournament will win half the kingdom and the hand of Bruno’s daughter in marriage once the monster is slain.

Sneaking in when one of the guards is taking a dump outside the wall, Dennis follows an errant turnip through the tournament grounds into a blacksmith shop, which he inadvertently destroys. He meets up with a loudmouth squire, who uses him as a scapegoat to make off with an innkeeper’s wife. The innkeeper figures out what happened and starts a brawl with Dennis, which winds up getting them both arrested and taken before the king. Yes, I realize this seems like a lot of pointless explanation, but it sets up my favorite joke in the whole movie. Once they’re in the king’s court, the innkeeper starts another fight trying to get at Dennis. A keg of flour is exploded by a wildly swung ax, and when the dust clears, Dennis has escaped. The innkeeper is left standing alone, with a mouth bloodied from the fight. The senile king, using what little logic he can muster, drops the public disturbance charges and instead convicts the innkeeper of cannibalism.

Meanwhile, Dennis’s escape leads him to the chambers of the princess, who naturally assumes he’s a prince come to sweep her away from the tower full of nuns where she lives. Dodging that bullet, Dennis runs into the loudmouth squire again on the tournament grounds, just as Passelewe convinces the king that the old-fashioned tournament to the death is killing off all their knights instead of finding them a champion. The king, bored with the whole thing, announces instead a game of hide-and-seek. The squire convinces Dennis to go squire for the Fish Knight who has just won the hide-and-seek, and so Dennis sets off with his new master to fight the monster.

All the rich merchants of the city decide the monster is worth more to them alive, as its presence has driven up the price of commerce and made them all fat. They round up all the remaining knights from the tournament (the ones who are actually good at fighting, not just hide-and-seek), and send them after the Fish Knight.

The Black Knight arrives first, chopping the Fish Knight clean in half with a battle ax. The rest of the troops surround Dennis and are about to cleave him asunder when the Jabberwocky makes its appearance. It’s too bad it gets so little screen time, as it’s a damn fine monster. A 12-foot-tall marionette/man-in-a-suit hybrid, and a surreally creepy one at that, with huge chicken feet, ragged, flapping wings, and a beaked head sporting a spray of horns that would make Lucifer himself jealous. It eats Dennis’s assailants, and lunges for the cowering cooper, impaling itself on his sword. He returns to the castle victorious, where Griselda suddenly finds him very attractive, but he’s swept away from her to marry the princess and live confusedly ever after.

I really want to love the hell out of Jabberwocky. As it is, I like it quite a lot, but it’s flawed. The most fatal of these flaws is there’s way too much plot getting in the way of the story, which makes it really damn boring through the middle. There’s a lot of Python-style humor used, but without the hyper-kinetic energy present when the whole crew is involved.

Holy Grail is universally considered by scholars of history to be the most accurate portrayal of medieval England ever put on film (a surprising close second being A Knight’s Tale, go figure). I would say that, were Jabberwocky a better-known flick, it would take that second-place spot. Perhaps it would even steal first. If anything, it’s even dingier and more diseased-looking than Holy Grail, and if there were only two qualities you could use to describe the middle ages, they’d be dingy and diseased.

Coupled with the extremely low-key delivery of the jokes, this visible state of decay makes the humor seem blacker than Satan’s asshole. Indeed, the humor seems almost a byproduct of the situations in the flick, but not the goal itself. It’s like Gilliam thinks decay and disease are inherently funny, and set out to make a serious movie but made a comedy by accident because he‘s a malignant weirdo (which makes him just that much more awesome in my book). What would be hilarious in a more brightly-colored and lively-portrayed situation becomes incredibly mean-spirited with a bitter aftertaste of hopelessness. When Holy Grail was being written and someone said, “Let’s see how we can make the plague funny,” Gilliam probably replied, “You mean it isn’t?”

You’d think this would make for the nastiest dark comedy you’d ever seen, but a lot of the more slapstick stuff tends to fall flat under the weight of the dark tone, and the middle part of the movie loses nearly all its momentum and follows Dennis through a bunch of situations which are, while not exactly random and unrelated to the story, certainly unnecessary.

Visually, Jabberwock is fantastic. As I said before, it’s oppressively dreary and washed out-looking, which is exactly what you want for a horror movie set in the middle ages. The forests, captured through film so grainy and yellowed that it looks like the stock itself was dipped in a vat of melting plague dead, look like something from the cover of an old Emperor record. In the opening kill scene, Gilliam uses a camera trick that would suggest a certain young Michigan filmmaker may have taken some inspiration from Jabberwocky when shooting Evil Dead.

This visual style helps a great deal when the monster appears, as well. I would imagine that a digital cleanup and DVD release would ruin much of the movie’s atmosphere, revealing all sorts of strings and zippers on the flopping horror at the end, and turning the haunted woods into an enchanted fairyland.

It’s really too bad that what could have been an awesome horror flick, and an awesome black comedy, winds up fizzling by going in too many directions at once. The story and direction lose focus, and a lot of energy that could have been put to use creating better gags or more atmosphere, or best of all, more screen time for the badass monster, winds up going to waste. Not the great movie it should be, but a damn good one regardless.